Stranger in a Strange Land
Title: Stranger in a Strange Land
Author: Zion Shadowlet
Beta: None
Characters: Ruki, Fuwa (OC)
Pairing: Fuwa/Ruki
Genre: Romance
Rating: R
Summary: Two strangers, a musician void of inspiration and a fugitive seek the solitude and secrecy of an old rundown apartment building in the city of Hong Kong. In a spell of loneliness, they are drawn to one another and into a love that may be as transient as it is beautiful.
Warnings: OC, Very Abstract
Notes: This is a birthday present to my beta butterflysaga (She writes great Alice Nine fanfiction btw). She requested it in the one shot request post that I made some time ago and I decided to write it before I finished Forever & Ever since I am broke and have nothing else to offer her. I fear though, that I haven’t at all been very loyal to what she asked for. She wrote that she would like: a “Fuwa/Ruki onshot in which Ruki gets into some kind of trouble with a young and slightly dangerous Fuwa. Of course I want it to be romance with a dash of comedy.” Now, there is little to no comedy and Ruki doesn’t really run into any trouble. >.< Fuwa, though is younger in this fic, roughly in his mid to late 30s and Ruki is in his late 20’s.
It is important to note too that this fic is very much indebted to Wong Kar Wai’s film “In the Mood for Love” and I wrote a great deal of this to Orbison’s Blue Angel and Yumeji’s theme by Shigeru Umebayashi which appears prominently in the film. I suppose you can say that this is a tribute to that movie as well to my great beta. Hopefully with this, she can get her Fuki fix.
The name of it I was unaware of is actually the name of a book, but I took it from a U2 song which has nothing to do with the fiction but whose name I believe applies.
I would also like to say that this fiction is written very differently compared to my other fanfictions and it is in the style I write in with my original fiction which is rather abstract and strange. So, it may be hard to follow for some.
I am nervous as to how it turned out but the more I mull over it, the more I will go insane. So, here it is and I will try to keep my filthy editing hands off of it.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
Time itself stands still.
The breath inside suspends. Until it exists no more.
Down, down the long silver slope, the eye’s focus blurs out everything else except for this one thing. Upon its surface, you can see the reflection of reality angled downward: one’s personal sinister mirror to the world.
An elegant piece of death: the body of a pointed pistol.
In your hand, it feels heavier than the weight on Atlas’ shoulders. Pull the trigger, squeeze the throat in an elegant snap. The spark that brings to life a speeding bullet. Seconds. Seconds. They turn into an eternity. And once it’s free, once it pierces the flesh and sends a man down to his death, the scene replays over and over in your head.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
And it rolls and rolls down the hill and for eternity, you will push it back up to the top. Only for it to fall down again.
One bullet ceaselessly fires. A shot. A shot.
Didn’t you know that Prometheus was chained and tortured by the Gods for giving Man the gift of fire? Makes sense, doesn’t it? But what does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?
You always thought the fire was wisdom, didn’t you? Now, you’re not too sure what any of it means anymore.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
It is 3 in the morning. The only light in his dark apartment came from the television set. The young man stares at it intently, his pale face changes colors with the shifting frames on the screen. The red glow of the actress’ dress, the yellow of the filmed street light, the dense black of her hair-all of these colors paint his white skin. He watches the protagonist in a land full of temples, climb a hill and into a tree, this man leans over and whispers something in it, something he wants no one else to ever hear. A secret.
The film ends. The young man mindlessly watches the credits roll across the screen. Sitting up, he rubs his face forcibly as if he were trying to scrub the sleep from his eyes. In his lonely apartment, he looks around as if expecting a change that no matter how he wished for it, would not come.
For days afterward though, he wasn’t able to let this movie go. He could hear the music in his ears, see frames of the beautiful woman in her finely cut Mandarin dresses, her charming lover lighting a cigarette, the dirty alley walls. He didn’t even enjoy it that much when he was watching it but there was something about the film that stuck to him and wouldn’t let him go as if the thing had a spirit of its own- as if objects, if ideas, if moods could have spirits of their own.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
The “Jap House” as the Hong Kong locals called it was a four story building built in the 1930’s that stood now, largely in disrepair. It was so aptly named after the owner himself, a Japanese businessman that used to work in the entertainment industry back in the 1980s before fully dedicating himself at the turn of the century to the thing that truly turned him into a made man: crime. Now, putting his song and dance days aside, he focused mainly on smuggling Chinese heroin into Japan along with young Southeast Asian prostitutes. He was known mainly as Chiba nowadays. What his real name was no one could remember or rather no one dared to. He knew all sorts of people: criminals, enka singers, businessmen, foreign bankers, ambassadors, pop singers, famous actors. The Jap House was just one of this Jack of All Trades’ many Chinese properties and for the most part, he could have cared less for it. It served mainly as a getaway place for those in Japan that happened to have connections whether known or unknown to him.
One of these ignorant tenants was none other than our protagonist, the young and talented and somewhat successful rock and roll musician, Ruki.
He moved into his temporary getaway during the rainy season when the sky for weeks was a pale grey and the air was forever thick with moisture. It would be more accurate to describe his vacation apartment as a loft for it consisted of only several rooms: a bathroom with an old shower, a cut-away kitchen and a very large room that served as a bedroom and a living room but mainly as a studio.
For all its flaws, it was secluded and cut off from his life back in Tokyo. Here, in this place with the wallpaper peeling off of the walls, the rhythmic patter of the rain leaking through the ancient roof-here in this place he could be alone and do what he had been unable to do for months, write. The people here mostly kept to themselves, at least that is what Maeda, his producer had told him when he suggested this place for him. “It’s in a center of a poor Chinese neighborhood and most of those people don’t care for us Japanese but they for the most part, will leave you alone and the tenants, don’t worry about them.”
“What are they like?” Ruki had asked.
“Think of a circus of the strangest and most rejected people you’ve ever known.”
He had yet to see any of these people. He climbed up the winding cement steps of the narrow emergency stairwell in solitary silence. As he made his way up and up, he had no idea how well acquainted he would become with this place, with this deserted stairwell. And for days, he spoke to no one. He didn’t even make a phone call. And because he could not communicate with any of the Chinese that lived here, he made his simple and rare transactions for food and for other necessities in made-up sign language and after he would eat, he would stare out the windows of the balcony out at the rooftops of Hong Kong’s poorest district until he could take the quiet no more. Taking his guitar to the stairwell, he would sit down on the steps and begin to play, hoping that a melody would come to him, something that would break his rut.
“You need to get away,” Maeda had said to him. “Find your inspiration again.”
He never felt so at peace in his life. But then again, he never felt so lonely either.
He had been there 6 days when he finally spoke to someone for the first time, a very old WWII Veteran who lived on the first floor. He shouted something at Ruki as if he were ordering him to return to his regiment. Ruki had stared at him in fear before he realized that the man was senile and was reliving an old war memory. He must have seen Ruki’s young face and was reminded of one of his old comrades. Out of respect, Ruki had said nothing.
On the 7th day, he spoke to his second person. The meeting was unexpected. As usual, Ruki sat on the cement steps with his guitar in hand, strumming away. He had closed his eyes and let himself ago, opening his mouth and letting his voice carry out a melody that had come to him at that moment. Throughout the stairwell, his deep voice echoed and swallowed up the oppressive silence into the its low vibrations.
“You have a beautiful voice,” a man had suddenly said. Ruki surprised, stopped singing. He opened his eyes, seeing immediately a tall lithe man leaning against the grey wall in front of him. He must have been in his mid-thirties. His black hair was cut short and smoothed back charmingly. He wore a white dress shirt tucked slightly into his beige slacks and in the crook of his arm, he carried with him several books. In his other hand, he twirled a pair of reading glasses. The tall thin man must have taken them off his face so he could see Ruki better and without them, he revealed his soft but dark eyes that watched the young musician now with a steady and curious gaze.
“Thank you,” Ruki bowed politely.
“Do you…do you do that for a living?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Music.”
“Yes.”
Standing up straight, the man made his way over to the steps. “Will you perform something for me?” he asked sweetly.
With a short nod, Ruki positioned his hands on the guitar and started to play a song that he had written. It had been a while since he had heard his own music or had even performed something that he himself had made-not until his last tour. But that was months ago, a sea away and a world apart. Now, he was in this empty stairwell, alone with this tall stranger. He played this song only because he had asked him to.
“Those lyrics,” the stranger said. “Did you write them?”
“Yes.”
‘They’re beautiful too,” he smiled at him and Ruki could see in his face a moment of mystification.
“Thank you,” Ruki bowed once more.
The stranger suddenly becoming aware or how upfront he was, laughed embarrassedly. “I’m sorry,” he said with a smile. “Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Fuwa Toru.” He extended his hand.
“Matsumoto Takanori but please call me Ruki.” Extending his own hand, he shook his.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The meeting didn’t last long after that. Fuwa slowly retracted his hand from his and rested it casually in his pocket as his eyes travelled around the blank stairwell for something to say. “Are you staying on the 4th floor?” he asked finally coming upon something.
“Mhm. Since its raining, the roof is always leaking.”
“Is it?”
“Mhm. It’s bothersome. I’ve had to put pans underneath the holes to collect the rainwater. Normally, I don’t mind the sound but sometimes…it can get so quiet…”
“That the patter starts to bother you,” Fuwa had finished off his sentence for him, phrasing it more as a statement than as a question.
Ruki’s eyes lifted to his face. “Yes,” he replied. “It can start to bother you.”
Although the both of them were starved for conversation, for the mere sound of a familiar word, they could think of very little to talk about. “I should leave you to your music,” Fuwa had said as he placed the thin glasses on his face. Ruki bowed politely as he made his way past him, heading to what he figured was his own apartment. The sound of his footsteps however soft, against the perpetual silence emanated throughout the hallway in a hollow echo. “It can get very lonely here Mr. Matsumoto,” he said as he reached the top of the landing above him. “Very lonely.”
“Ruki. Call me Ruki.”
Fuwa paused and stopping with him, the gentle pattern of his footsteps.“Ruki,” he corrected himself. Perhaps he waited for the musician to say something more, perhaps deep inside he hoped he would but when he was met with only silence on the other end, he continued on his way.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
“Think of a circus of the strangest and most rejected people you’ve ever known.”
Maeda had been referring to the tenants but the longer that the young man had wandered around the crowded streets of Hong Kong, it felt as if his words could apply to the city that was sprawled out in front of him in a colorful and cluttered disarray. He wondered why he had come here, what had attracted to him a place like this. Every day when he would venture out to the market, he would walk past the poor Chinese that had lived there, most of which were either aloof to him or cold and he would past all sort of immigrants, some from Africa, some from nearby Asian countries and he would watch them wondering what they were there for and why they had come, feeling with them a strange sense of affinity.
But most of these people were poor. And he knew that they had come seeking the wealth that the city and all its chaos promised.
When he would return to the old apartment building, he would often go up to the roof and eat his food there, looking out at the cluttered skyline and the hazy glow it casted upon the mountains, counting the lit windows amongst the darkened ones.
These moments weren’t so terribly lonely although when he finally found the energy in him to get up, he felt the loneliness descend over him like a heavy cloud and it was times like that, that it all seemed unbearable. Even though he knew he should, he never called anyone, limiting himself to email letters of strangely pensive prose that his friends found a bit disconcerting. But this is perhaps why he had come, to change his way of seeing, his way of thinking.
Being alone in a nation of a billion people changes you.
And he would have stayed alone if it weren’t for the rain that came one night, falling over the city in a fury so great that the roof above him felt as if it were swelling and the telephones lines smacked viciously against each other outside of his window and the never ending tapping tapping of the rainwater seeping in through the cracks. He woke up in a fright but the fear soon passed and he laid there in bed listening to the storm outside and the pattern of the water falling into the kitchen pans and he felt a panic well up in him as if it were measuring time toward some great unknown moment.
He sat up suddenly. His heart racing. He wanted more than anything to be anywhere but here in this city, in this haunted building, surrounded by these ghostly heartbroken people.
He needed to get away from that apartment, away from that dripping.
Walking down the hallway brought the young man a bit of consolation. It felt good to move his limbs. It gave him the feeling that he was going somewhere even though he wasn’t. The light above him glowed an almost invasive orange, making the walls around him look filthy and aged. What little comfort that he had felt at that moment was robbed the longer he stayed out there under those lights. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to listen to the sounds coming from the apartments: a television broadcast running in a loop the same infomercial, the clanging of someone washing their dishes, silence, silence, on the television an older Chinese woman singing an aged love song, a couple arguing bitterly. When he reached the end of the hall, startling him and comforting him all at once, he heard the sound of sweet old jazz music behind the wood of a shut door and he could hear someone setting something heavy down on a table. He stopped and opened his eyes.
Why he had decided to knock, he couldn’t have quite explained. Perhaps, it was the desperation brought on by the loneliness and the fear of the storm that had made him so bold. Maybe it was because it was so late at night, during one of those lost hours that seem to belong to another realm where the laws of physics and reality aren’t quite the same.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Being alone in a nation of a billion people changes you.
“For the most part, I just read. It pushes away the loneliness for awhile,” the stranger called Fuwa sat at his desk surrounded by books of all kinds. They lined the walls of the apartment like bound and colorful skyscrapers and where they had not met the wall, he had scraps of stray paper pinned. Written on their surfaces in beautiful calligraphy were Kanji that Ruki couldn’t understand. Some phrases he could grasp, some eluded him completely.
“Are those old poems?” he asked.
Fuwa turned around and followed his eyes. The smoke that trailed upward from his cigarette in a pale wave smelled sweet in the thick humid air. “Several of them are old poems.”
“And the others?”
“Modern poets, some are myself.”
“I’m sorry. I must seem like an intruder,” Ruki laughed embarrassedly and folded his arms. “Coming over at this strange hour.”
Fuwa smiled. “I don’t mind. I could use the company.”
The low lighting made the room glow gold. There were so many things inside of the small old apartment that Ruki distracted by them forgot about the storm outside that raged into the night relentlessly. He heard it but he didn’t care anymore.
“Did you come here to write?”
“Did you?” Fuwa looked away from him and stared at the surface of his desk absently.
“Mhm, I did,” Ruki nodded. “Why are you here?”
“You’re very curious,” Fuwa smiled once more and it was obvious to the young man that he was hiding something.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
Fuwa smothering out the end of his cigarette stood up and let the remaining smoke leave him through the parting of his lips. Ruki watched it as it left his body like a breath and was dyed a bolder white in the lamp’s light. “We’ve only just met.”
“But you’re the only person I know.” Ruki said with a friendly and playful smile. Looking up at Fuwa, his eyes were two dark half moons. The smile grew on his round face, perhaps the result of the young man’s embarrassment and Fuwa looking down on him felt for a second that he had been dreaming, the moment had felt so strange and so sudden. A curious charming young man sitting on the edge of his bed with a voice as deep as the night is black.
“Is that so?”
“Yes”
“Will you sing for me?”
“Not for free.”A small warm laugh.
“What’s the cost?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?”
“Why are you are here.”
“You know I could lie to you.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“Are you?”
“As long as it’s interesting.”
“The truth is always more interesting.”
“That’s how I know you won’t lie to me.” The smile grew even wider as he leaned forward, somewhat self-conscious of his own boldness.
Fuwa turned around; extracting another cigarette from the small pack, as he lit it he stared at the wall of poems. Resting his hands on his narrow waist, he inhaled the smoke slowly as if the act itself were sacred. The young man watched his lithe figure noticing how tall he stood and how straight. For a moment his attention was arrested by the beautiful bends of the room’s shadows as they ran down the center of his long back caught as they were by the firmness of his shoulder blades.
His voice thick with smoke, Fuwa replied “That is a heavy price.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Ruki didn’t sing that night. Perhaps the price was too steep for the stranger to pay.
They talked however about various things, about the books that cluttered his apartment in a sort of beautiful suffocation, about the old veteran on the first floor; about how heartbroken he had made them feel, about the couple that was always fighting, the Hong Kong skyline and why Ruki’s hair was blonde. And the storm raged outside the window until it at last, tired itself into silence. But the two men kept talking. They hadn’t spoken to another soul in so long it seemed that they couldn’t stop. It was like eating after a long spell of starvation, and like dry earth touched finally by the ferocious waters of a rainstorm, they soaked up the sound of another’s voice until they themselves could no longer stay awake.
But for several days it was like this. Ruki would walk to his apartment and knock on his door, asking for something arbitrary: salt or a book to read (which he never even considered opening), only to start talking to him again. He found Fuwa fascinating. And through all their conversations, he tried to grasp anything that would tell of who he really was and what sort of life he had lived in Japan but the man was so careful with his words and so secretive that for a large part, Fuwa was a great mystery. He knew what sort of person he was-what he believed, what he thought about but he was completely ignorant of what sort of job he held or whether or not he was married or from where in Japan he was born. With them, they had a relationship completely opposite of the ones that Ruki had back home where the latter was the only thing you knew about most people including ones you considered your friends. He didn’t know their thoughts on the concept of fasting or abstinence or poetry or love-but Fuwa talked readily about these things.
He took a great fascination with the woman who fought with her husband every night, talking about the look in her eyes when he had passed her in the stairwell carrying up bags of groceries that she wouldn’t let Fuwa help her with; he would talk in length about her love for the man that hurt her so badly and contrary to what most people would say, calling her a fool for staying with him, he had a curiously open heart toward her and every day, he seemed to have thought of something new about her life and what he believed she was like.
“You sound like you are in love with her,” Ruki had said.
“Not at all. She’s a romantic. Delusional. In a way, there is an escapist in me that wishes to be like her…strangely.”
“To be in love so much that it kills you?”
“It’s foolish and it’s wrong and more than anything somewhat selfish but…” he would look off at moments like that, stare out the window with his brow lowered and his eyes soft. “There is a thing that makes you wish that a feeling could be strong enough to crush you, right? I think if people didn’t believe love could kill you, they wouldn’t have the will to live.”
“Mr. Fuwa, you are romantic,” Ruki laughed.
“Am I wrong?” Without waiting for an answer, he had already changed his mind. “I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in…”
“Maybe you are in love with her,” Ruki teased.
“Hardly…besides being in love with a woman,” he lit a cigarette as he stared out the window, gazing out at the old crowded apartment buildings. “Would be strange.”
“Strange?”
“For me…strange.” With reservation, he admitted finally “I’m a homosexual.”
The words hung in the quiet that followed. “Oh,” was all Ruki said.
“I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable.” Fuwa still faced the window but he was no longer looking out.
“No, not at all” he replied. For several long seconds, they sat in a deep palpable silence, each man immersed in his own thoughts about the other. “Mr. Fuwa, you’re a very interesting,” Ruki said with a charming laugh.
“Perhaps.”
It was late in the day and the sky had turned an unusual gold color as the sun, pulled to the west, rested on the horizon beyond the ratty old apartment buildings and the hills. Ruki lit a cigarette and the room was so quiet that the sound of the trees thick in their foliage rustled in the wind and the air as he breathed it in, could be heard entering his body. “Have you ever been in love?” he asked in his thick deep voice. To Fuwa’s ears, even his most simple of sentences seemed like music.
“No, I haven’t.”
“I want to fall in love,” he paused, taking his time with his words as he usually did, picking them with great care. “Sometimes, I think I need to.”
“Why is that?”
He rested his elbow against himself, the smoke rising up like a curling pillar into the air. “Things are so different from when I was younger.”
Fuwa stood up and walking toward him, almost boldly but delicately plucked the cigarette from the bow of the musician’s fingers. He looked up at him without protest.
“I had so much anger and awe back then, a wiliness to love even…Now, it seems I have mostly anger left.”
Fuwa brought the cigarette to his own lips and still feeling the indent Ruki’s lips had left on the sensitive paper of the filter, took a long drag.
“And it’s frustrating, you know. When you start doing this for a living, the very thing itself becomes strained,” he tilted his head as he considered the oddness of the word. “People try to sell you, people take little bits of you, and you don’t notice it at first, it’s so small but after awhile, you grow so tired and no amount of enthusiasm and inspiration will get you through the day.” His eyes rested on the wall opposite of him, past the stranger and onto the towers of books he’s never read. “It’s hard to explain. It’s not that I’m not hungry anymore. I suppose I just don’t feel that awe.” He wrapped his arms around himself and gazed forward without focus. “Even when I see something beautiful, the soul inside, it collapses when I need it to rise.”
“Is that why you’ve come here?”
“Yes, to fall in love,” he looked back up at him with two large black crescent moons and there was something about him that even though he was a man, that reminded Fuwa of an innocent child. “I saw this film…sometimes you see things and they put things in your head and you can’t get them out. Well, I saw this film and it made Hong Kong seem like the Paris of the East, the perfect place to fall in love.” He laughed bitterly. “Funny, it’s the loneliest place I’ve ever been.”
Fuwa lifted up the cigarette and holding it in front of Ruki’s mouth, presented it for him to take with his lips. Ruki smiled, opening his mouth and wrapping his lips around the cigarette as the stranger still held it in his hand. “I still want you to sing for me,” Fuwa said with a gentle smile of his own.
He took a long drag before replying. “You have to tell me why you are here.” The cigarette at that moment was a luxury to him and it held within its engulfing smoke a slow eroticism that gradually took hold of him, slowing down his breath, making the tips of his fingers raw and sensitive.
Why should Fuwa keep it a secret from this stranger? Did it matter if he knew? And even if Ruki knew, would he even leave? It didn’t seem like something he would do.
“You can trust me,” Ruki purred in his deep voice. “I can keep secrets.”
“You can keep secrets?
“Mhm,” he smirked.
“You promise, you’ll sing for me?”
“Promise.”
“I killed a man.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
How did it happen, he asks. You close your eyes and the scene that has been replaying over and over in the theater of your eyelids comes back and you see it there now, in the distortion of your memory. You knew it was different, you knew that everything didn’t look so twisted, so cartoony. But, you’ve fallen down the rabbit’s hole and down into a twisted wonderland.
There was a very important man, you begin. Important, he asks. Yes, important. He was in politics. He held a lot of influence. He wasn’t a very good man, this man although he would have everyone believe it.
Before you shot him, he was looking up at you on his knees and his face was stained red as he begged for his life, pathetically and bitterly.
Did he deserve to die? He asks.
I don’t know, you reply. I suppose that depends on who you ask.
I’m asking you.
At the time, I thought he did.
But now?
Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
The thing about these politicians is they can send a garrison of boys to their death without ever seeing a drop of blood. He was pathetic and small. And for all your compassion, you despised him. No amount of philosophy was going to change your mind and in the end, you’ve been in this world your whole life.
I was born doing these things it seems, you tell him. He asks you to sit down next to him and you do so. He smells like expensive cologne and you wonder what he smells like in the space where his neck meets the edge of his jaw right beneath the ear in that small vulnerable spot, shaded now by his soft blonde hair.
Born? He repeats it back at you.
My older brothers do this, you say and you tell him about your dead father and your respected uncle. To some people, you too are a very important man and not a very good one either.
Was he the only person you’ve killed?
Yes.
So you are a criminal.
An illegal one, yes.
There are legal ones?
There are all sorts of criminals. Legal, Illegal, Moral, Immoral, Amoral, Guilty, Innocent. All sort of criminals, you say. The line between good and evil is thin like the skin of an apple.
Why did you kill this particular man?
We don’t like to kill you see. It’s very bad actually.
So why him?
He was going to trade certain people in, people you were close to, your brothers in order to purify his image, to get ahead. It wasn’t anything one wouldn’t expect him to do. But he had nothing to lose now. Nothing could tarnish his reputation and he said that he could at any moment, change the balance of power to his side and it was the unknowing, that possibility that any moment, he would say something or do something, that made you and everyone around you grow anxious.
Kill him and end it.
You said you would do it to spare your brothers.
At that moment, it felt it had to be done. But did it?
You regret it now, don’t you, he asks.
I don’t know how I became this way. It seems I was born in a cyclone of some sorts and now with this one shot, it’s all over and not the way I had wanted it to be. Not at all.
I wish I knew what to say to you. His voice is beautiful and soft in all its depth. If it means anything to you, I think you are a good man.
You do?
I do.
A better man wouldn’t have gone through with it.
Well, I’ve never met a better man.
You don’t know me very well.
I know what you’ve done and it hasn’t changed my mind about you at all.
Thank you is all you say.
Lay down and relax, he says and places his hands on your shoulder gently directing you downward and onto your back. Just relax, he repeats. Close your eyes. Let it out of your mind. Do you want me to sing for you now?
I will like that very much.
Okay. He smiles as he looks down at you. His eyes large, his lips plush in the gentle light of the setting sun. Close your eyes and just listen and only listen.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Next to Ruki, Fuwa had fallen asleep. The young musician finished his final song and sits there in the silence of the darkened room. The window is open and a warm breeze blows in and sends the curtains sailing out into the black of night. The perpetual glow of the Hong Kong fills the room as if it were made of water.
It was 9 in the evening. Couldn’t have been any later. A Chinese woman from across the way, leaned out her window and shouted to her neighbor below. A dog barked at a passing car. Several young men down the street worked on an old motorcycle with metal tools, periodically revving up its aged and rusted motor. Next to Ruki, Fuwa breathed deeply in his heavy slumber. Something about being calm that makes you hear everything in a different way-something about being in this room with the patient quiet of the troubled philosopher that makes the senses stronger, linked even. And now, listening to the world around him, sound itself had the sensual quality of touch.
He had been sitting but now he turned to the man next to him and mirrored the way he was laying, facing the other. Such a strange place this is. Down the hall, the couple has already started fighting and another stranger to drown out the noise has turned up the volume on their television. The same singing competition with the same old love songs.
Ruki reaches out and touches the center of the other’s brow with the tip of his middle finger and drags it softly downward, down the bridge between his closed eyes, down the length of his nose, down the space above the lips and onto the flesh of the lips themselves where his finger pauses and bends, parting them.
There is something about this man that he needs. Something about the delicacy in which he talks, something about the passion that he brings to his words as he speaks. Ruki knows that there is a part of this man that finds himself ridiculous, he can see it when he laughs slightly after he has just spoken and his eyes look the other way.
Ruki leans forward and presses his lips against his finally releasing his finger and the man’s lip rises back up to meet its other and pushes up against Ruki’s instead. And Ruki kisses him. Softly at first and then deeply.
The kiss has roused him. Fuwa opens his eyes and at first the young man doesn’t notice until he smiles against Ruki’s kisses and he knows that he is awake. He lifts up his hand and threads his fingers into his soft blonde hair. Everything is so gentle: the lips that kiss, the hands that run down the skin of the cheek, of the neck, the arms that wrap around the other.
All it takes is one pressing kiss that forces the tongue within the mouth, a leg that snakes up between the other’s and pushes upward. Fuwa grabs his hand the way one might wrap their hand around a small bird, the fingers curling around the knuckles as if it were the animal’s round breast only to force it open and drag the flat of his palm against his until he reaches the wrist where he holds him there tightly. And as if he had caught him, he pushes him on his back with his arms pinned against the bed and his mouth against his, breathing heavily a breath into him.
And now the hands are travelling downward, down the forearms, the elbows, the firm sides of the torso where they reach the waist and he slides his fingers underneath the shirt the way one slips a tongue into a kiss, and the hands like a wave, travel back upward revealing the naked skin of the stomach and the chest.
He kisses the bare nipples. Kisses the stomach and releases his hands, undoes the fastening to his pants and pulls them downward. Ruki throws his head back, his chin up into the air and runs his hands down Fuwa’s head, down his spine and across the expanse of his back feeling the soft surface of the cotton shirt cool underneath the hot and damp skin of his hands. When he feels his mouth on him, feels the tongue press up against his hardened penis, he lets out a deep throated moan and it sounds almost as sweet as his voice when he sings.
Fuwa sits up and begins to undo the buttons on his shirt one by one as the other playfully bends his knee and smacks it softly against his side flirtatiously like a child gently teasing. Fuwa removes the rest of his clothes and grabs this knee, wrapping his hand underneath it, lifting it up as he lowers himself. Chest to chest now. He pushes himself inside of him and sends the singer moaning loudly once more in a mixture of pleasure and of pain.
“Easy,” Fuwa whispers as he pushes the hair away from Ruki’s face. He smiles sweetly and presses a soft kiss on the tip of his chin and another on his nose. “Does it hurt?” There he is again, gentle and sweet. Perhaps if he were merely passionate, the memory of him would soon fade in Ruki’s mind but it wasn’t so. Even in the dark, he could see the kind look in his dark eyes blending curiously with his desire and Ruki felt inside his chest, a fluttering feeling as if his soul felt like a bird inside of him spreading it wings in the air before taking flight.
He wraps in arms around Fuwa’s neck and smiles. “It feels good.” And then a sharp moan, high pitched and breathy. Fuwa kisses his neck and buries his face into his hair, resting his lips against the edge of his jawline, right beneath the ear where the scent that comes off his skin smells raw and human and sweet.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
It was easy for them to become lovers. It was the natural course of things. Maybe they even knew it the first time they spoke that this was how it would be. But being in a place like this, surrounded by a billion hungry and lonely strangers, there is a profound intimacy one finds in the small moments of shaking another’s hand, of sharing a small secret in the dark of night, of listening to the sound of man singing next to you peacefully lulling you to sleep. Maybe in this loneliness, you learn to truly love, to truly touch, to truly kiss.
There was a great big world outside that continued on in the ever constant spinning of the globe with all its crushing disasters and its scientific miracles but this world was separated from them by the thick film that surrounded those that lived in that lonely and desperate city, in that forlorn neighborhood and in that rotting building whose roof overlooked the chameleon skyline of Hong Kong in all its beauty, guttered out and gleaming, filled with drifters, thieves, business men, seamstresses, cubicle slaves, immigrants and whores. Perhaps there was another city beyond this one that resembled all other cities with its middle class mundane, with its proper families that sent their healthy happy daughters off to college ready to lose their virginity to their varsity sweetheart but if it was there, it was somewhere hidden behind the constant fog of the streetlights and the neon signs.
For days, Ruki would walk down that hallway to the last door at the end and knock at first, he claimed that his trips were too bring the books he had borrowed back but Fuwa of course, knew that this wasn’t the case and fortunately for them both, he never bothered to ask him if he had read them which naturally, he had not. After he achieved his admission, he would sit like he always would at the edge of his bed and talk. Sometimes, they would be quiet at first and then one would speak, mention something they had seen or a thought they had conceived the night before as they laid in bed, trying to sleep but were too clouded with ideas or memories of their separate life back in Japan but mostly they were arrested with secret thoughts of the other that kept them tossing and turning, consumed with desire and anxious for affection but mostly in need simply for the other’s presence-but they would never tell each other this. For them, it was abstract ideas, nothing as real as the physical need.
And then the moment would come when Ruki would say a suggestive phrase, would move in a certain way, rubbing knees together and biting his bottom lip. He would often lean forward and look up at him with large eyes and every word from there on was laced with the erotic purr of the young man’s deep and sensuous voice. He would ask for a cigarette or for something else, anything that would make the other man go near him and when he was close enough, he would touch him slightly, a pushing of the knee against his leg, a cupping of the hand with his own and Fuwa just as desirous as he, would sit down close to him and as time inched forward, their bodies would gravitate toward one another and Ruki would lean in and kiss him and Fuwa would run his hands up his inner thigh and gingerly touch his covered and hardened organ until the arousal was so great, he would either push him down onto the bed or get on his knees in front of him.
Afterwards, they would lie next to one another and talk. And it would always end with Ruki singing him to sleep in a soft voice and when morning came, he would leave his apartment in the gentle golden glow of the rising sun, slipping out of bed not wanting to wake him and getting dressed as quickly as the quiet would allow. And at last, he would go back to his own apartment where the silence there was as oppressive as hot air.
Then, the spell of loneliness would set in as if it were an act of nature. And he would go about it like a man suffering from a sickness, dealing with it without protest. The emails he would send took him hours. With a cigarette in hand, he would sit on the bed and stare at the computer and the words that he had written, reading them over and over again until his mind had grown tired and he would stare off, bored into reverie. He would bring the guitar up to the roof sometimes with a notebook and pen in hand and attempt to write songs. Sometimes he would come up with a phrase, a shard of a melody and that seemed enough.
He had served his time in purgatory.
Plucking out a random book from the stack gathered on his end table, he would make his way back to Fuwa’s to start it all over again.
“Ruki,” he smiled warmly when he opened the door as if he hadn’t expected him.
“I came to return this.”
“Come in.”
“How have you been?”
“Okay. How are you?”
“Better.”
But something has got to give. Nothing lasts forever. Everything ends, changes. Especially in that city. They no longer saw the old veteran. Maybe he died, maybe he went back home-if he had one. They didn’t know who to ask. Who would know? Who would care?
Ruki stopped trying to write songs. He stopped borrowing the books. One day he just brought his belongings down the hall in a suitcase and knocked on the door. Fuwa didn’t even ask. He stepped aside and let him in.
Even as they happened, the days they had spent together seemed like an elusive dream, the kind that is like a daydream late on a summer day when the sun is filtering through the trembling leaves and it pours over you like a wave made of light and wind. But here in Hong Kong, it was a daze of neon lights, of Chinese women shouting to one another from their kitchen windows, to endless television shows, to the same hot noodles and the sound of rain, and the grey sky, and the night without stars, the low mountains, and the speckled horizon of skyscrapers. And the love then, came easy and simply without any questions, without any demands, without any fear.
Ruki knew that he had got what he wanted: to fall in love. On a rainy day, he picked up his guitar and started playing old songs that would be on the radio when he was kid, the kind that everyone knew, the sort of love odes that people sung in karaoke bars or family get-togethers. Fuwa seemed to like those songs and he sat next to him with a wide, warm smile and sang along with Ruki, clapping and the two of them laughed as they crooned out the bittersweet lyrics. “You are the kind of person who likes karaoke, aren’t you?” Ruki teased.
“Am I that obvious?” Fuwa laughed.
Giggling charmingly, Ruki said “Maybe in another life, you would have been an enka singer.”
“Would have suited me better.”
“It would have.”
Ruki, seemingly out of nowhere, put his guitar aside and leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”
“Did what?” He threaded his fingers through his blonde hair, feeling their soft strands swimming into his hand like water.
“Made me fall in love with you.”
“Made you?” He laughed and it sent ripples throughout Ruki like light dancing on the surface of a still lake.
“Because I told you that I needed to.”
“You must think I’m a magician.”
“Are you?” He kissed him softly once again, wrapped his hand around his throat and rested his mouth against his chin where he could feel the rough stubble against the sensitive skin of his lips.
“I wish I was.”
“Do you love me?” Ruki looked up into his eyes.
“I love you.”
When the two of them would go out to see the city, they would often frequent old movie theaters where they would watch the latest Hong Kong action flick or an American love story, never understanding a word of it. They would go to bars and listen to the juke boxes and Fuwa would pick his old karaoke songs or a random Chinese one just for fun or he would we pick Orbison’s Blue Angel or the Beatles’ Something and to please Ruki, he would sometimes select Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain-but always a love song. And they would order whiskey but Ruki would never touch it, he would just watch the green and red bar lights dance through the liquid and the glass. They would go on long walks and when it would rain, they would stand under the awnings and watch it fall with the neon lights in the distance. They would go to crowded cafeterias where in the corner, a group of men played Mahjong and their wives greeted one another in forced garish charm as they traded gossip laced in ancient superstitions. They seemed to talk even more excitedly at places like this. And from under the table, Ruki would playfully kick Fuwa’s leg and Fuwa would smile back at him, never striking back.
He was very different. Compared to everything around him, he truly seemed a foreign thing, even to himself where a man like him, a man that had killed before, should blend in like an object in the scenery but he was like a rosary around the neck of a whore. Somehow, it seemed out of place at a glance only for one to realize that brought the vulnerability and the humanity of all that was around it.
He was subtle and he would look down and smile politely even to someone like Ruki, and his eyes were clear and compassionate and his words carefully chosen. When he smoked in the middle of these crowded cafeterias, he seemed like a saint as he watched the wayward and lonely world around him with his legs crossed, with a thin burning cigarette in his hand and his gaze forever kind.
“Are you ever going back to Tokyo?” Ruki asked one late evening as he sat across from him in a dirty old cafeteria whose interior looked like the neon, fluorescent bleached tiled insides of a public bathroom. There were 20 identical tables laid out in a white monotonous grid but only 3 were occupied-everyone had went home or wandered off into the night. In the corner, the middle-aged men playing mahjong, across from at the other end; a lone and quiet teenage runaway who wore a thick ratty black sweater and carried her things in a beaten up Swiss Army bag where several years ago, her and her best friend scribbled obscenities and of course, the two Japanese lovers, that talked to each other in low sensuous voices in their strange language whose sweet sound was like a soft curling drum roll or the patter of rain against the glass of the window and the wooden surface of the ledge.
“I don’t think I am.”
“Do you think you will get caught?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“A strong a possibility?”
“A strong possibility.”
“Will you stay here?”
“Without you, I don’t think I can.”
“Without you,” Ruki echoed. “What will happen to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have to go back to Tokyo in a week. You remember that, right?”
“I remember. You have to go back to your band.” A tender smile. A hand reaching across the table to grab his.
“There must be something we can do. There must be someone you know, someone that can help you.”
“I don’t want to endanger you.”
But Ruki wasn’t listening. “I can’t leave you here. You know I can’t.”
Fuwa looked down and stared at the white surface of the squared table made of stucco-like plastic where in its creases, dirt had gathered.
“I’m not going to quit.”
“Ruki, there are things that are too big to fight.”
“And then there are things that are so big that you have to fight for them.”
Fuwa’s eyes shot up to the singer’s round face that despite his years had cuteness of a child. His expression was however serious as he stared at him with the look of desperation in the full blackness of his gaze. The soberness of his words and the love that surely fueled them filled Fuwa with a profound sense of affection and despite the subject matter, he felt happy. “I wish I knew what to do.”
“There is no one?”
“No one I trust.”
“No one that owes anything to you?”
“Ruki, I told you. I don’t want to associate with those people anymore even if they are my relatives or my former friends, especially if you are around. It will only endanger you.”
There was no budging. Ruki sighed and looked off, resting his eyes absently on the teenage girl who poked at her food as if time itself was a dreadful weight upon her. “I don’t know if I will be able to bear life without you.”
“We’ve only just met.” A useless reply. Ruki didn’t bother to say anything to his words. Like Fuwa, he knew that they meant nothing, that he felt the same. “Name the place,” he said suddenly.
“The place?”
“Where we will meet again, somewhere that isn’t here, that isn’t Hong Kong, that isn’t Japan. Tell me where and when and I’ll be there.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
The last night they were together in that haunted city, the fugitive Fuwa dreamt of that fateful moment once more. It was only months ago but he had relived it so many times now that it felt like something from the distant past, buried deep within him.
In his memory, it was merely a reflection. He couldn’t see before it or beyond. He couldn’t see around it. Just that angled mirror and the tip that pointed downward to a man with red tear stained eyes looking up at him pathetically as the fluorescent overhead light poured down on his face bringing out every single pore, every wrinkle, every crease in his distressed brow.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
You let go of your soul during moments like this and you become a thing that does not think, that does not feel and during that absence, your body becomes forever scarred. When at last, the soul returns, it is too big to fit back inside and it suffocates there inside of you, constrained.
He never told Ruki about these nightmares. He never told him how the memory would come back to him throughout the day. Sometimes a man would pass by and his profile looked like the dead man’s and Fuwa would turn quickly as if he had seen a ghost; sometimes a stranger’s perfume smelled like the flowers that he had in his office the night he died, their pungent scent permeating throughout the room as they rotted in the corner. Sometimes it was a sound of the traffic outside, a word, or the sight of an actor weeping on the television screen.
But he would keep these things to himself. Never spoiling the happiness of the moment, never tarnishing Ruki with those memories, leaving what they had between them pure.
The last night they were together, he woke Ruki up to make love to him. With his passion, he made him forget what he had done and with his love, he made him forget who he was and Fuwa needed that just one more time.
That night it rained and Fuwa wouldn’t let him sleep, he kept him up, kissing him, touching him. Even after he came, he stayed there inside of him, holding him, running his lips across his neck repeatedly until the young man giggled and purred.
“Did you ever write a song?”
“No,” Ruki laughed. In the dark, his face was like a pale moon and his laughter was thick and deep like night water.
“How useless.” He laughed with him.
“How useless.”
When the morning came, he kissed him for the final time. Fuwa closed his eyes and felt him leave the room as if he carried a part of his soul with him, and he felt it physically inside him as if it were pulled out by a string, stolen and taken away across the sea to place he couldn’t return to.
He disappeared from his life just as quickly as he emerged. Fuwa’s existence regressed and he was once again, the tortured philosopher who read all day to keep away the silence. He was once again the fugitive saint watching the lost humanity swarm around him, never bothering to speak to them.
Until at last, he left Hong Kong and wandered east.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
“Tell me where and when and I’ll be there” he had said.
6 months later. Los Angeles. In that cheap cafeteria with the sound of mahjong tiles smacking against one another and Chinese men laughing in the distance, Ruki had wrote down the name of the hotel on a napkin and slid it across the table and Fuwa had looked at it, folded it up and put it in his pocket.
Now, he waits there alone for hours as the waiter refills his cup of tea and the strangers pass by, coming and going, coming and going. But he stays. Waiting. Alone.
“Okay to smoke?” he asks the waiter in his stiff English.
“It’s okay,” he replies. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“Mhm,” Ruki nods as he pulls out a long cigarette and lights its end.
To be in love so much that it kills you.
When he returned to Tokyo, he wrote and wrote. The melodies poured from him like blood from an open wound. A love song. A love song. A love song. He could write nothing else.
There is a thing that makes you wish that a feeling could be strong enough to crush you.
Beyond the tall glass windows, against the dark of night, the palm trees sway in the hot California air. A beautiful young woman walks pass and her face is so sweet it makes him feel empty inside. Where she was going, he didn’t know and he never turns around to see.
He was a stranger in a strange land, waiting for a lover that he feared will never come. He steals a glance at her and looks away.
If people didn’t believe love could kill you, they wouldn’t have the will to live.
He closes his eyes and takes another drag from the cigarette.
The world feels as if it is about to swallow him.
“Did I keep you waiting?” A familiar voice in a familiar language.
Ruki looks up, two black crescent moons for eyes and coy smirk. “Mr. Fuwa,” he says with a smile as the pain as quickly as it came, fades away. “You are indeed, a romantic.”
Author: Zion Shadowlet
Beta: None
Characters: Ruki, Fuwa (OC)
Pairing: Fuwa/Ruki
Genre: Romance
Rating: R
Summary: Two strangers, a musician void of inspiration and a fugitive seek the solitude and secrecy of an old rundown apartment building in the city of Hong Kong. In a spell of loneliness, they are drawn to one another and into a love that may be as transient as it is beautiful.
Warnings: OC, Very Abstract
Notes: This is a birthday present to my beta butterflysaga (She writes great Alice Nine fanfiction btw). She requested it in the one shot request post that I made some time ago and I decided to write it before I finished Forever & Ever since I am broke and have nothing else to offer her. I fear though, that I haven’t at all been very loyal to what she asked for. She wrote that she would like: a “Fuwa/Ruki onshot in which Ruki gets into some kind of trouble with a young and slightly dangerous Fuwa. Of course I want it to be romance with a dash of comedy.” Now, there is little to no comedy and Ruki doesn’t really run into any trouble. >.< Fuwa, though is younger in this fic, roughly in his mid to late 30s and Ruki is in his late 20’s.
It is important to note too that this fic is very much indebted to Wong Kar Wai’s film “In the Mood for Love” and I wrote a great deal of this to Orbison’s Blue Angel and Yumeji’s theme by Shigeru Umebayashi which appears prominently in the film. I suppose you can say that this is a tribute to that movie as well to my great beta. Hopefully with this, she can get her Fuki fix.
The name of it I was unaware of is actually the name of a book, but I took it from a U2 song which has nothing to do with the fiction but whose name I believe applies.
I would also like to say that this fiction is written very differently compared to my other fanfictions and it is in the style I write in with my original fiction which is rather abstract and strange. So, it may be hard to follow for some.
I am nervous as to how it turned out but the more I mull over it, the more I will go insane. So, here it is and I will try to keep my filthy editing hands off of it.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
Time itself stands still.
The breath inside suspends. Until it exists no more.
Down, down the long silver slope, the eye’s focus blurs out everything else except for this one thing. Upon its surface, you can see the reflection of reality angled downward: one’s personal sinister mirror to the world.
An elegant piece of death: the body of a pointed pistol.
In your hand, it feels heavier than the weight on Atlas’ shoulders. Pull the trigger, squeeze the throat in an elegant snap. The spark that brings to life a speeding bullet. Seconds. Seconds. They turn into an eternity. And once it’s free, once it pierces the flesh and sends a man down to his death, the scene replays over and over in your head.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
And it rolls and rolls down the hill and for eternity, you will push it back up to the top. Only for it to fall down again.
One bullet ceaselessly fires. A shot. A shot.
Didn’t you know that Prometheus was chained and tortured by the Gods for giving Man the gift of fire? Makes sense, doesn’t it? But what does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?
You always thought the fire was wisdom, didn’t you? Now, you’re not too sure what any of it means anymore.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
It is 3 in the morning. The only light in his dark apartment came from the television set. The young man stares at it intently, his pale face changes colors with the shifting frames on the screen. The red glow of the actress’ dress, the yellow of the filmed street light, the dense black of her hair-all of these colors paint his white skin. He watches the protagonist in a land full of temples, climb a hill and into a tree, this man leans over and whispers something in it, something he wants no one else to ever hear. A secret.
The film ends. The young man mindlessly watches the credits roll across the screen. Sitting up, he rubs his face forcibly as if he were trying to scrub the sleep from his eyes. In his lonely apartment, he looks around as if expecting a change that no matter how he wished for it, would not come.
For days afterward though, he wasn’t able to let this movie go. He could hear the music in his ears, see frames of the beautiful woman in her finely cut Mandarin dresses, her charming lover lighting a cigarette, the dirty alley walls. He didn’t even enjoy it that much when he was watching it but there was something about the film that stuck to him and wouldn’t let him go as if the thing had a spirit of its own- as if objects, if ideas, if moods could have spirits of their own.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
The “Jap House” as the Hong Kong locals called it was a four story building built in the 1930’s that stood now, largely in disrepair. It was so aptly named after the owner himself, a Japanese businessman that used to work in the entertainment industry back in the 1980s before fully dedicating himself at the turn of the century to the thing that truly turned him into a made man: crime. Now, putting his song and dance days aside, he focused mainly on smuggling Chinese heroin into Japan along with young Southeast Asian prostitutes. He was known mainly as Chiba nowadays. What his real name was no one could remember or rather no one dared to. He knew all sorts of people: criminals, enka singers, businessmen, foreign bankers, ambassadors, pop singers, famous actors. The Jap House was just one of this Jack of All Trades’ many Chinese properties and for the most part, he could have cared less for it. It served mainly as a getaway place for those in Japan that happened to have connections whether known or unknown to him.
One of these ignorant tenants was none other than our protagonist, the young and talented and somewhat successful rock and roll musician, Ruki.
He moved into his temporary getaway during the rainy season when the sky for weeks was a pale grey and the air was forever thick with moisture. It would be more accurate to describe his vacation apartment as a loft for it consisted of only several rooms: a bathroom with an old shower, a cut-away kitchen and a very large room that served as a bedroom and a living room but mainly as a studio.
For all its flaws, it was secluded and cut off from his life back in Tokyo. Here, in this place with the wallpaper peeling off of the walls, the rhythmic patter of the rain leaking through the ancient roof-here in this place he could be alone and do what he had been unable to do for months, write. The people here mostly kept to themselves, at least that is what Maeda, his producer had told him when he suggested this place for him. “It’s in a center of a poor Chinese neighborhood and most of those people don’t care for us Japanese but they for the most part, will leave you alone and the tenants, don’t worry about them.”
“What are they like?” Ruki had asked.
“Think of a circus of the strangest and most rejected people you’ve ever known.”
He had yet to see any of these people. He climbed up the winding cement steps of the narrow emergency stairwell in solitary silence. As he made his way up and up, he had no idea how well acquainted he would become with this place, with this deserted stairwell. And for days, he spoke to no one. He didn’t even make a phone call. And because he could not communicate with any of the Chinese that lived here, he made his simple and rare transactions for food and for other necessities in made-up sign language and after he would eat, he would stare out the windows of the balcony out at the rooftops of Hong Kong’s poorest district until he could take the quiet no more. Taking his guitar to the stairwell, he would sit down on the steps and begin to play, hoping that a melody would come to him, something that would break his rut.
“You need to get away,” Maeda had said to him. “Find your inspiration again.”
He never felt so at peace in his life. But then again, he never felt so lonely either.
He had been there 6 days when he finally spoke to someone for the first time, a very old WWII Veteran who lived on the first floor. He shouted something at Ruki as if he were ordering him to return to his regiment. Ruki had stared at him in fear before he realized that the man was senile and was reliving an old war memory. He must have seen Ruki’s young face and was reminded of one of his old comrades. Out of respect, Ruki had said nothing.
On the 7th day, he spoke to his second person. The meeting was unexpected. As usual, Ruki sat on the cement steps with his guitar in hand, strumming away. He had closed his eyes and let himself ago, opening his mouth and letting his voice carry out a melody that had come to him at that moment. Throughout the stairwell, his deep voice echoed and swallowed up the oppressive silence into the its low vibrations.
“You have a beautiful voice,” a man had suddenly said. Ruki surprised, stopped singing. He opened his eyes, seeing immediately a tall lithe man leaning against the grey wall in front of him. He must have been in his mid-thirties. His black hair was cut short and smoothed back charmingly. He wore a white dress shirt tucked slightly into his beige slacks and in the crook of his arm, he carried with him several books. In his other hand, he twirled a pair of reading glasses. The tall thin man must have taken them off his face so he could see Ruki better and without them, he revealed his soft but dark eyes that watched the young musician now with a steady and curious gaze.
“Thank you,” Ruki bowed politely.
“Do you…do you do that for a living?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Music.”
“Yes.”
Standing up straight, the man made his way over to the steps. “Will you perform something for me?” he asked sweetly.
With a short nod, Ruki positioned his hands on the guitar and started to play a song that he had written. It had been a while since he had heard his own music or had even performed something that he himself had made-not until his last tour. But that was months ago, a sea away and a world apart. Now, he was in this empty stairwell, alone with this tall stranger. He played this song only because he had asked him to.
“Those lyrics,” the stranger said. “Did you write them?”
“Yes.”
‘They’re beautiful too,” he smiled at him and Ruki could see in his face a moment of mystification.
“Thank you,” Ruki bowed once more.
The stranger suddenly becoming aware or how upfront he was, laughed embarrassedly. “I’m sorry,” he said with a smile. “Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Fuwa Toru.” He extended his hand.
“Matsumoto Takanori but please call me Ruki.” Extending his own hand, he shook his.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The meeting didn’t last long after that. Fuwa slowly retracted his hand from his and rested it casually in his pocket as his eyes travelled around the blank stairwell for something to say. “Are you staying on the 4th floor?” he asked finally coming upon something.
“Mhm. Since its raining, the roof is always leaking.”
“Is it?”
“Mhm. It’s bothersome. I’ve had to put pans underneath the holes to collect the rainwater. Normally, I don’t mind the sound but sometimes…it can get so quiet…”
“That the patter starts to bother you,” Fuwa had finished off his sentence for him, phrasing it more as a statement than as a question.
Ruki’s eyes lifted to his face. “Yes,” he replied. “It can start to bother you.”
Although the both of them were starved for conversation, for the mere sound of a familiar word, they could think of very little to talk about. “I should leave you to your music,” Fuwa had said as he placed the thin glasses on his face. Ruki bowed politely as he made his way past him, heading to what he figured was his own apartment. The sound of his footsteps however soft, against the perpetual silence emanated throughout the hallway in a hollow echo. “It can get very lonely here Mr. Matsumoto,” he said as he reached the top of the landing above him. “Very lonely.”
“Ruki. Call me Ruki.”
Fuwa paused and stopping with him, the gentle pattern of his footsteps.“Ruki,” he corrected himself. Perhaps he waited for the musician to say something more, perhaps deep inside he hoped he would but when he was met with only silence on the other end, he continued on his way.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
“Think of a circus of the strangest and most rejected people you’ve ever known.”
Maeda had been referring to the tenants but the longer that the young man had wandered around the crowded streets of Hong Kong, it felt as if his words could apply to the city that was sprawled out in front of him in a colorful and cluttered disarray. He wondered why he had come here, what had attracted to him a place like this. Every day when he would venture out to the market, he would walk past the poor Chinese that had lived there, most of which were either aloof to him or cold and he would past all sort of immigrants, some from Africa, some from nearby Asian countries and he would watch them wondering what they were there for and why they had come, feeling with them a strange sense of affinity.
But most of these people were poor. And he knew that they had come seeking the wealth that the city and all its chaos promised.
When he would return to the old apartment building, he would often go up to the roof and eat his food there, looking out at the cluttered skyline and the hazy glow it casted upon the mountains, counting the lit windows amongst the darkened ones.
These moments weren’t so terribly lonely although when he finally found the energy in him to get up, he felt the loneliness descend over him like a heavy cloud and it was times like that, that it all seemed unbearable. Even though he knew he should, he never called anyone, limiting himself to email letters of strangely pensive prose that his friends found a bit disconcerting. But this is perhaps why he had come, to change his way of seeing, his way of thinking.
Being alone in a nation of a billion people changes you.
And he would have stayed alone if it weren’t for the rain that came one night, falling over the city in a fury so great that the roof above him felt as if it were swelling and the telephones lines smacked viciously against each other outside of his window and the never ending tapping tapping of the rainwater seeping in through the cracks. He woke up in a fright but the fear soon passed and he laid there in bed listening to the storm outside and the pattern of the water falling into the kitchen pans and he felt a panic well up in him as if it were measuring time toward some great unknown moment.
He sat up suddenly. His heart racing. He wanted more than anything to be anywhere but here in this city, in this haunted building, surrounded by these ghostly heartbroken people.
He needed to get away from that apartment, away from that dripping.
Walking down the hallway brought the young man a bit of consolation. It felt good to move his limbs. It gave him the feeling that he was going somewhere even though he wasn’t. The light above him glowed an almost invasive orange, making the walls around him look filthy and aged. What little comfort that he had felt at that moment was robbed the longer he stayed out there under those lights. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to listen to the sounds coming from the apartments: a television broadcast running in a loop the same infomercial, the clanging of someone washing their dishes, silence, silence, on the television an older Chinese woman singing an aged love song, a couple arguing bitterly. When he reached the end of the hall, startling him and comforting him all at once, he heard the sound of sweet old jazz music behind the wood of a shut door and he could hear someone setting something heavy down on a table. He stopped and opened his eyes.
Why he had decided to knock, he couldn’t have quite explained. Perhaps, it was the desperation brought on by the loneliness and the fear of the storm that had made him so bold. Maybe it was because it was so late at night, during one of those lost hours that seem to belong to another realm where the laws of physics and reality aren’t quite the same.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Being alone in a nation of a billion people changes you.
“For the most part, I just read. It pushes away the loneliness for awhile,” the stranger called Fuwa sat at his desk surrounded by books of all kinds. They lined the walls of the apartment like bound and colorful skyscrapers and where they had not met the wall, he had scraps of stray paper pinned. Written on their surfaces in beautiful calligraphy were Kanji that Ruki couldn’t understand. Some phrases he could grasp, some eluded him completely.
“Are those old poems?” he asked.
Fuwa turned around and followed his eyes. The smoke that trailed upward from his cigarette in a pale wave smelled sweet in the thick humid air. “Several of them are old poems.”
“And the others?”
“Modern poets, some are myself.”
“I’m sorry. I must seem like an intruder,” Ruki laughed embarrassedly and folded his arms. “Coming over at this strange hour.”
Fuwa smiled. “I don’t mind. I could use the company.”
The low lighting made the room glow gold. There were so many things inside of the small old apartment that Ruki distracted by them forgot about the storm outside that raged into the night relentlessly. He heard it but he didn’t care anymore.
“Did you come here to write?”
“Did you?” Fuwa looked away from him and stared at the surface of his desk absently.
“Mhm, I did,” Ruki nodded. “Why are you here?”
“You’re very curious,” Fuwa smiled once more and it was obvious to the young man that he was hiding something.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
Fuwa smothering out the end of his cigarette stood up and let the remaining smoke leave him through the parting of his lips. Ruki watched it as it left his body like a breath and was dyed a bolder white in the lamp’s light. “We’ve only just met.”
“But you’re the only person I know.” Ruki said with a friendly and playful smile. Looking up at Fuwa, his eyes were two dark half moons. The smile grew on his round face, perhaps the result of the young man’s embarrassment and Fuwa looking down on him felt for a second that he had been dreaming, the moment had felt so strange and so sudden. A curious charming young man sitting on the edge of his bed with a voice as deep as the night is black.
“Is that so?”
“Yes”
“Will you sing for me?”
“Not for free.”A small warm laugh.
“What’s the cost?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?”
“Why are you are here.”
“You know I could lie to you.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“Are you?”
“As long as it’s interesting.”
“The truth is always more interesting.”
“That’s how I know you won’t lie to me.” The smile grew even wider as he leaned forward, somewhat self-conscious of his own boldness.
Fuwa turned around; extracting another cigarette from the small pack, as he lit it he stared at the wall of poems. Resting his hands on his narrow waist, he inhaled the smoke slowly as if the act itself were sacred. The young man watched his lithe figure noticing how tall he stood and how straight. For a moment his attention was arrested by the beautiful bends of the room’s shadows as they ran down the center of his long back caught as they were by the firmness of his shoulder blades.
His voice thick with smoke, Fuwa replied “That is a heavy price.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Ruki didn’t sing that night. Perhaps the price was too steep for the stranger to pay.
They talked however about various things, about the books that cluttered his apartment in a sort of beautiful suffocation, about the old veteran on the first floor; about how heartbroken he had made them feel, about the couple that was always fighting, the Hong Kong skyline and why Ruki’s hair was blonde. And the storm raged outside the window until it at last, tired itself into silence. But the two men kept talking. They hadn’t spoken to another soul in so long it seemed that they couldn’t stop. It was like eating after a long spell of starvation, and like dry earth touched finally by the ferocious waters of a rainstorm, they soaked up the sound of another’s voice until they themselves could no longer stay awake.
But for several days it was like this. Ruki would walk to his apartment and knock on his door, asking for something arbitrary: salt or a book to read (which he never even considered opening), only to start talking to him again. He found Fuwa fascinating. And through all their conversations, he tried to grasp anything that would tell of who he really was and what sort of life he had lived in Japan but the man was so careful with his words and so secretive that for a large part, Fuwa was a great mystery. He knew what sort of person he was-what he believed, what he thought about but he was completely ignorant of what sort of job he held or whether or not he was married or from where in Japan he was born. With them, they had a relationship completely opposite of the ones that Ruki had back home where the latter was the only thing you knew about most people including ones you considered your friends. He didn’t know their thoughts on the concept of fasting or abstinence or poetry or love-but Fuwa talked readily about these things.
He took a great fascination with the woman who fought with her husband every night, talking about the look in her eyes when he had passed her in the stairwell carrying up bags of groceries that she wouldn’t let Fuwa help her with; he would talk in length about her love for the man that hurt her so badly and contrary to what most people would say, calling her a fool for staying with him, he had a curiously open heart toward her and every day, he seemed to have thought of something new about her life and what he believed she was like.
“You sound like you are in love with her,” Ruki had said.
“Not at all. She’s a romantic. Delusional. In a way, there is an escapist in me that wishes to be like her…strangely.”
“To be in love so much that it kills you?”
“It’s foolish and it’s wrong and more than anything somewhat selfish but…” he would look off at moments like that, stare out the window with his brow lowered and his eyes soft. “There is a thing that makes you wish that a feeling could be strong enough to crush you, right? I think if people didn’t believe love could kill you, they wouldn’t have the will to live.”
“Mr. Fuwa, you are romantic,” Ruki laughed.
“Am I wrong?” Without waiting for an answer, he had already changed his mind. “I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in…”
“Maybe you are in love with her,” Ruki teased.
“Hardly…besides being in love with a woman,” he lit a cigarette as he stared out the window, gazing out at the old crowded apartment buildings. “Would be strange.”
“Strange?”
“For me…strange.” With reservation, he admitted finally “I’m a homosexual.”
The words hung in the quiet that followed. “Oh,” was all Ruki said.
“I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable.” Fuwa still faced the window but he was no longer looking out.
“No, not at all” he replied. For several long seconds, they sat in a deep palpable silence, each man immersed in his own thoughts about the other. “Mr. Fuwa, you’re a very interesting,” Ruki said with a charming laugh.
“Perhaps.”
It was late in the day and the sky had turned an unusual gold color as the sun, pulled to the west, rested on the horizon beyond the ratty old apartment buildings and the hills. Ruki lit a cigarette and the room was so quiet that the sound of the trees thick in their foliage rustled in the wind and the air as he breathed it in, could be heard entering his body. “Have you ever been in love?” he asked in his thick deep voice. To Fuwa’s ears, even his most simple of sentences seemed like music.
“No, I haven’t.”
“I want to fall in love,” he paused, taking his time with his words as he usually did, picking them with great care. “Sometimes, I think I need to.”
“Why is that?”
He rested his elbow against himself, the smoke rising up like a curling pillar into the air. “Things are so different from when I was younger.”
Fuwa stood up and walking toward him, almost boldly but delicately plucked the cigarette from the bow of the musician’s fingers. He looked up at him without protest.
“I had so much anger and awe back then, a wiliness to love even…Now, it seems I have mostly anger left.”
Fuwa brought the cigarette to his own lips and still feeling the indent Ruki’s lips had left on the sensitive paper of the filter, took a long drag.
“And it’s frustrating, you know. When you start doing this for a living, the very thing itself becomes strained,” he tilted his head as he considered the oddness of the word. “People try to sell you, people take little bits of you, and you don’t notice it at first, it’s so small but after awhile, you grow so tired and no amount of enthusiasm and inspiration will get you through the day.” His eyes rested on the wall opposite of him, past the stranger and onto the towers of books he’s never read. “It’s hard to explain. It’s not that I’m not hungry anymore. I suppose I just don’t feel that awe.” He wrapped his arms around himself and gazed forward without focus. “Even when I see something beautiful, the soul inside, it collapses when I need it to rise.”
“Is that why you’ve come here?”
“Yes, to fall in love,” he looked back up at him with two large black crescent moons and there was something about him that even though he was a man, that reminded Fuwa of an innocent child. “I saw this film…sometimes you see things and they put things in your head and you can’t get them out. Well, I saw this film and it made Hong Kong seem like the Paris of the East, the perfect place to fall in love.” He laughed bitterly. “Funny, it’s the loneliest place I’ve ever been.”
Fuwa lifted up the cigarette and holding it in front of Ruki’s mouth, presented it for him to take with his lips. Ruki smiled, opening his mouth and wrapping his lips around the cigarette as the stranger still held it in his hand. “I still want you to sing for me,” Fuwa said with a gentle smile of his own.
He took a long drag before replying. “You have to tell me why you are here.” The cigarette at that moment was a luxury to him and it held within its engulfing smoke a slow eroticism that gradually took hold of him, slowing down his breath, making the tips of his fingers raw and sensitive.
Why should Fuwa keep it a secret from this stranger? Did it matter if he knew? And even if Ruki knew, would he even leave? It didn’t seem like something he would do.
“You can trust me,” Ruki purred in his deep voice. “I can keep secrets.”
“You can keep secrets?
“Mhm,” he smirked.
“You promise, you’ll sing for me?”
“Promise.”
“I killed a man.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
How did it happen, he asks. You close your eyes and the scene that has been replaying over and over in the theater of your eyelids comes back and you see it there now, in the distortion of your memory. You knew it was different, you knew that everything didn’t look so twisted, so cartoony. But, you’ve fallen down the rabbit’s hole and down into a twisted wonderland.
There was a very important man, you begin. Important, he asks. Yes, important. He was in politics. He held a lot of influence. He wasn’t a very good man, this man although he would have everyone believe it.
Before you shot him, he was looking up at you on his knees and his face was stained red as he begged for his life, pathetically and bitterly.
Did he deserve to die? He asks.
I don’t know, you reply. I suppose that depends on who you ask.
I’m asking you.
At the time, I thought he did.
But now?
Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
The thing about these politicians is they can send a garrison of boys to their death without ever seeing a drop of blood. He was pathetic and small. And for all your compassion, you despised him. No amount of philosophy was going to change your mind and in the end, you’ve been in this world your whole life.
I was born doing these things it seems, you tell him. He asks you to sit down next to him and you do so. He smells like expensive cologne and you wonder what he smells like in the space where his neck meets the edge of his jaw right beneath the ear in that small vulnerable spot, shaded now by his soft blonde hair.
Born? He repeats it back at you.
My older brothers do this, you say and you tell him about your dead father and your respected uncle. To some people, you too are a very important man and not a very good one either.
Was he the only person you’ve killed?
Yes.
So you are a criminal.
An illegal one, yes.
There are legal ones?
There are all sorts of criminals. Legal, Illegal, Moral, Immoral, Amoral, Guilty, Innocent. All sort of criminals, you say. The line between good and evil is thin like the skin of an apple.
Why did you kill this particular man?
We don’t like to kill you see. It’s very bad actually.
So why him?
He was going to trade certain people in, people you were close to, your brothers in order to purify his image, to get ahead. It wasn’t anything one wouldn’t expect him to do. But he had nothing to lose now. Nothing could tarnish his reputation and he said that he could at any moment, change the balance of power to his side and it was the unknowing, that possibility that any moment, he would say something or do something, that made you and everyone around you grow anxious.
Kill him and end it.
You said you would do it to spare your brothers.
At that moment, it felt it had to be done. But did it?
You regret it now, don’t you, he asks.
I don’t know how I became this way. It seems I was born in a cyclone of some sorts and now with this one shot, it’s all over and not the way I had wanted it to be. Not at all.
I wish I knew what to say to you. His voice is beautiful and soft in all its depth. If it means anything to you, I think you are a good man.
You do?
I do.
A better man wouldn’t have gone through with it.
Well, I’ve never met a better man.
You don’t know me very well.
I know what you’ve done and it hasn’t changed my mind about you at all.
Thank you is all you say.
Lay down and relax, he says and places his hands on your shoulder gently directing you downward and onto your back. Just relax, he repeats. Close your eyes. Let it out of your mind. Do you want me to sing for you now?
I will like that very much.
Okay. He smiles as he looks down at you. His eyes large, his lips plush in the gentle light of the setting sun. Close your eyes and just listen and only listen.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
Next to Ruki, Fuwa had fallen asleep. The young musician finished his final song and sits there in the silence of the darkened room. The window is open and a warm breeze blows in and sends the curtains sailing out into the black of night. The perpetual glow of the Hong Kong fills the room as if it were made of water.
It was 9 in the evening. Couldn’t have been any later. A Chinese woman from across the way, leaned out her window and shouted to her neighbor below. A dog barked at a passing car. Several young men down the street worked on an old motorcycle with metal tools, periodically revving up its aged and rusted motor. Next to Ruki, Fuwa breathed deeply in his heavy slumber. Something about being calm that makes you hear everything in a different way-something about being in this room with the patient quiet of the troubled philosopher that makes the senses stronger, linked even. And now, listening to the world around him, sound itself had the sensual quality of touch.
He had been sitting but now he turned to the man next to him and mirrored the way he was laying, facing the other. Such a strange place this is. Down the hall, the couple has already started fighting and another stranger to drown out the noise has turned up the volume on their television. The same singing competition with the same old love songs.
Ruki reaches out and touches the center of the other’s brow with the tip of his middle finger and drags it softly downward, down the bridge between his closed eyes, down the length of his nose, down the space above the lips and onto the flesh of the lips themselves where his finger pauses and bends, parting them.
There is something about this man that he needs. Something about the delicacy in which he talks, something about the passion that he brings to his words as he speaks. Ruki knows that there is a part of this man that finds himself ridiculous, he can see it when he laughs slightly after he has just spoken and his eyes look the other way.
Ruki leans forward and presses his lips against his finally releasing his finger and the man’s lip rises back up to meet its other and pushes up against Ruki’s instead. And Ruki kisses him. Softly at first and then deeply.
The kiss has roused him. Fuwa opens his eyes and at first the young man doesn’t notice until he smiles against Ruki’s kisses and he knows that he is awake. He lifts up his hand and threads his fingers into his soft blonde hair. Everything is so gentle: the lips that kiss, the hands that run down the skin of the cheek, of the neck, the arms that wrap around the other.
All it takes is one pressing kiss that forces the tongue within the mouth, a leg that snakes up between the other’s and pushes upward. Fuwa grabs his hand the way one might wrap their hand around a small bird, the fingers curling around the knuckles as if it were the animal’s round breast only to force it open and drag the flat of his palm against his until he reaches the wrist where he holds him there tightly. And as if he had caught him, he pushes him on his back with his arms pinned against the bed and his mouth against his, breathing heavily a breath into him.
And now the hands are travelling downward, down the forearms, the elbows, the firm sides of the torso where they reach the waist and he slides his fingers underneath the shirt the way one slips a tongue into a kiss, and the hands like a wave, travel back upward revealing the naked skin of the stomach and the chest.
He kisses the bare nipples. Kisses the stomach and releases his hands, undoes the fastening to his pants and pulls them downward. Ruki throws his head back, his chin up into the air and runs his hands down Fuwa’s head, down his spine and across the expanse of his back feeling the soft surface of the cotton shirt cool underneath the hot and damp skin of his hands. When he feels his mouth on him, feels the tongue press up against his hardened penis, he lets out a deep throated moan and it sounds almost as sweet as his voice when he sings.
Fuwa sits up and begins to undo the buttons on his shirt one by one as the other playfully bends his knee and smacks it softly against his side flirtatiously like a child gently teasing. Fuwa removes the rest of his clothes and grabs this knee, wrapping his hand underneath it, lifting it up as he lowers himself. Chest to chest now. He pushes himself inside of him and sends the singer moaning loudly once more in a mixture of pleasure and of pain.
“Easy,” Fuwa whispers as he pushes the hair away from Ruki’s face. He smiles sweetly and presses a soft kiss on the tip of his chin and another on his nose. “Does it hurt?” There he is again, gentle and sweet. Perhaps if he were merely passionate, the memory of him would soon fade in Ruki’s mind but it wasn’t so. Even in the dark, he could see the kind look in his dark eyes blending curiously with his desire and Ruki felt inside his chest, a fluttering feeling as if his soul felt like a bird inside of him spreading it wings in the air before taking flight.
He wraps in arms around Fuwa’s neck and smiles. “It feels good.” And then a sharp moan, high pitched and breathy. Fuwa kisses his neck and buries his face into his hair, resting his lips against the edge of his jawline, right beneath the ear where the scent that comes off his skin smells raw and human and sweet.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
It was easy for them to become lovers. It was the natural course of things. Maybe they even knew it the first time they spoke that this was how it would be. But being in a place like this, surrounded by a billion hungry and lonely strangers, there is a profound intimacy one finds in the small moments of shaking another’s hand, of sharing a small secret in the dark of night, of listening to the sound of man singing next to you peacefully lulling you to sleep. Maybe in this loneliness, you learn to truly love, to truly touch, to truly kiss.
There was a great big world outside that continued on in the ever constant spinning of the globe with all its crushing disasters and its scientific miracles but this world was separated from them by the thick film that surrounded those that lived in that lonely and desperate city, in that forlorn neighborhood and in that rotting building whose roof overlooked the chameleon skyline of Hong Kong in all its beauty, guttered out and gleaming, filled with drifters, thieves, business men, seamstresses, cubicle slaves, immigrants and whores. Perhaps there was another city beyond this one that resembled all other cities with its middle class mundane, with its proper families that sent their healthy happy daughters off to college ready to lose their virginity to their varsity sweetheart but if it was there, it was somewhere hidden behind the constant fog of the streetlights and the neon signs.
For days, Ruki would walk down that hallway to the last door at the end and knock at first, he claimed that his trips were too bring the books he had borrowed back but Fuwa of course, knew that this wasn’t the case and fortunately for them both, he never bothered to ask him if he had read them which naturally, he had not. After he achieved his admission, he would sit like he always would at the edge of his bed and talk. Sometimes, they would be quiet at first and then one would speak, mention something they had seen or a thought they had conceived the night before as they laid in bed, trying to sleep but were too clouded with ideas or memories of their separate life back in Japan but mostly they were arrested with secret thoughts of the other that kept them tossing and turning, consumed with desire and anxious for affection but mostly in need simply for the other’s presence-but they would never tell each other this. For them, it was abstract ideas, nothing as real as the physical need.
And then the moment would come when Ruki would say a suggestive phrase, would move in a certain way, rubbing knees together and biting his bottom lip. He would often lean forward and look up at him with large eyes and every word from there on was laced with the erotic purr of the young man’s deep and sensuous voice. He would ask for a cigarette or for something else, anything that would make the other man go near him and when he was close enough, he would touch him slightly, a pushing of the knee against his leg, a cupping of the hand with his own and Fuwa just as desirous as he, would sit down close to him and as time inched forward, their bodies would gravitate toward one another and Ruki would lean in and kiss him and Fuwa would run his hands up his inner thigh and gingerly touch his covered and hardened organ until the arousal was so great, he would either push him down onto the bed or get on his knees in front of him.
Afterwards, they would lie next to one another and talk. And it would always end with Ruki singing him to sleep in a soft voice and when morning came, he would leave his apartment in the gentle golden glow of the rising sun, slipping out of bed not wanting to wake him and getting dressed as quickly as the quiet would allow. And at last, he would go back to his own apartment where the silence there was as oppressive as hot air.
Then, the spell of loneliness would set in as if it were an act of nature. And he would go about it like a man suffering from a sickness, dealing with it without protest. The emails he would send took him hours. With a cigarette in hand, he would sit on the bed and stare at the computer and the words that he had written, reading them over and over again until his mind had grown tired and he would stare off, bored into reverie. He would bring the guitar up to the roof sometimes with a notebook and pen in hand and attempt to write songs. Sometimes he would come up with a phrase, a shard of a melody and that seemed enough.
He had served his time in purgatory.
Plucking out a random book from the stack gathered on his end table, he would make his way back to Fuwa’s to start it all over again.
“Ruki,” he smiled warmly when he opened the door as if he hadn’t expected him.
“I came to return this.”
“Come in.”
“How have you been?”
“Okay. How are you?”
“Better.”
But something has got to give. Nothing lasts forever. Everything ends, changes. Especially in that city. They no longer saw the old veteran. Maybe he died, maybe he went back home-if he had one. They didn’t know who to ask. Who would know? Who would care?
Ruki stopped trying to write songs. He stopped borrowing the books. One day he just brought his belongings down the hall in a suitcase and knocked on the door. Fuwa didn’t even ask. He stepped aside and let him in.
Even as they happened, the days they had spent together seemed like an elusive dream, the kind that is like a daydream late on a summer day when the sun is filtering through the trembling leaves and it pours over you like a wave made of light and wind. But here in Hong Kong, it was a daze of neon lights, of Chinese women shouting to one another from their kitchen windows, to endless television shows, to the same hot noodles and the sound of rain, and the grey sky, and the night without stars, the low mountains, and the speckled horizon of skyscrapers. And the love then, came easy and simply without any questions, without any demands, without any fear.
Ruki knew that he had got what he wanted: to fall in love. On a rainy day, he picked up his guitar and started playing old songs that would be on the radio when he was kid, the kind that everyone knew, the sort of love odes that people sung in karaoke bars or family get-togethers. Fuwa seemed to like those songs and he sat next to him with a wide, warm smile and sang along with Ruki, clapping and the two of them laughed as they crooned out the bittersweet lyrics. “You are the kind of person who likes karaoke, aren’t you?” Ruki teased.
“Am I that obvious?” Fuwa laughed.
Giggling charmingly, Ruki said “Maybe in another life, you would have been an enka singer.”
“Would have suited me better.”
“It would have.”
Ruki, seemingly out of nowhere, put his guitar aside and leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”
“Did what?” He threaded his fingers through his blonde hair, feeling their soft strands swimming into his hand like water.
“Made me fall in love with you.”
“Made you?” He laughed and it sent ripples throughout Ruki like light dancing on the surface of a still lake.
“Because I told you that I needed to.”
“You must think I’m a magician.”
“Are you?” He kissed him softly once again, wrapped his hand around his throat and rested his mouth against his chin where he could feel the rough stubble against the sensitive skin of his lips.
“I wish I was.”
“Do you love me?” Ruki looked up into his eyes.
“I love you.”
When the two of them would go out to see the city, they would often frequent old movie theaters where they would watch the latest Hong Kong action flick or an American love story, never understanding a word of it. They would go to bars and listen to the juke boxes and Fuwa would pick his old karaoke songs or a random Chinese one just for fun or he would we pick Orbison’s Blue Angel or the Beatles’ Something and to please Ruki, he would sometimes select Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain-but always a love song. And they would order whiskey but Ruki would never touch it, he would just watch the green and red bar lights dance through the liquid and the glass. They would go on long walks and when it would rain, they would stand under the awnings and watch it fall with the neon lights in the distance. They would go to crowded cafeterias where in the corner, a group of men played Mahjong and their wives greeted one another in forced garish charm as they traded gossip laced in ancient superstitions. They seemed to talk even more excitedly at places like this. And from under the table, Ruki would playfully kick Fuwa’s leg and Fuwa would smile back at him, never striking back.
He was very different. Compared to everything around him, he truly seemed a foreign thing, even to himself where a man like him, a man that had killed before, should blend in like an object in the scenery but he was like a rosary around the neck of a whore. Somehow, it seemed out of place at a glance only for one to realize that brought the vulnerability and the humanity of all that was around it.
He was subtle and he would look down and smile politely even to someone like Ruki, and his eyes were clear and compassionate and his words carefully chosen. When he smoked in the middle of these crowded cafeterias, he seemed like a saint as he watched the wayward and lonely world around him with his legs crossed, with a thin burning cigarette in his hand and his gaze forever kind.
“Are you ever going back to Tokyo?” Ruki asked one late evening as he sat across from him in a dirty old cafeteria whose interior looked like the neon, fluorescent bleached tiled insides of a public bathroom. There were 20 identical tables laid out in a white monotonous grid but only 3 were occupied-everyone had went home or wandered off into the night. In the corner, the middle-aged men playing mahjong, across from at the other end; a lone and quiet teenage runaway who wore a thick ratty black sweater and carried her things in a beaten up Swiss Army bag where several years ago, her and her best friend scribbled obscenities and of course, the two Japanese lovers, that talked to each other in low sensuous voices in their strange language whose sweet sound was like a soft curling drum roll or the patter of rain against the glass of the window and the wooden surface of the ledge.
“I don’t think I am.”
“Do you think you will get caught?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“A strong a possibility?”
“A strong possibility.”
“Will you stay here?”
“Without you, I don’t think I can.”
“Without you,” Ruki echoed. “What will happen to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have to go back to Tokyo in a week. You remember that, right?”
“I remember. You have to go back to your band.” A tender smile. A hand reaching across the table to grab his.
“There must be something we can do. There must be someone you know, someone that can help you.”
“I don’t want to endanger you.”
But Ruki wasn’t listening. “I can’t leave you here. You know I can’t.”
Fuwa looked down and stared at the white surface of the squared table made of stucco-like plastic where in its creases, dirt had gathered.
“I’m not going to quit.”
“Ruki, there are things that are too big to fight.”
“And then there are things that are so big that you have to fight for them.”
Fuwa’s eyes shot up to the singer’s round face that despite his years had cuteness of a child. His expression was however serious as he stared at him with the look of desperation in the full blackness of his gaze. The soberness of his words and the love that surely fueled them filled Fuwa with a profound sense of affection and despite the subject matter, he felt happy. “I wish I knew what to do.”
“There is no one?”
“No one I trust.”
“No one that owes anything to you?”
“Ruki, I told you. I don’t want to associate with those people anymore even if they are my relatives or my former friends, especially if you are around. It will only endanger you.”
There was no budging. Ruki sighed and looked off, resting his eyes absently on the teenage girl who poked at her food as if time itself was a dreadful weight upon her. “I don’t know if I will be able to bear life without you.”
“We’ve only just met.” A useless reply. Ruki didn’t bother to say anything to his words. Like Fuwa, he knew that they meant nothing, that he felt the same. “Name the place,” he said suddenly.
“The place?”
“Where we will meet again, somewhere that isn’t here, that isn’t Hong Kong, that isn’t Japan. Tell me where and when and I’ll be there.”
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
The last night they were together in that haunted city, the fugitive Fuwa dreamt of that fateful moment once more. It was only months ago but he had relived it so many times now that it felt like something from the distant past, buried deep within him.
In his memory, it was merely a reflection. He couldn’t see before it or beyond. He couldn’t see around it. Just that angled mirror and the tip that pointed downward to a man with red tear stained eyes looking up at him pathetically as the fluorescent overhead light poured down on his face bringing out every single pore, every wrinkle, every crease in his distressed brow.
Everything looks different down the long silver barrel of a gun.
You let go of your soul during moments like this and you become a thing that does not think, that does not feel and during that absence, your body becomes forever scarred. When at last, the soul returns, it is too big to fit back inside and it suffocates there inside of you, constrained.
He never told Ruki about these nightmares. He never told him how the memory would come back to him throughout the day. Sometimes a man would pass by and his profile looked like the dead man’s and Fuwa would turn quickly as if he had seen a ghost; sometimes a stranger’s perfume smelled like the flowers that he had in his office the night he died, their pungent scent permeating throughout the room as they rotted in the corner. Sometimes it was a sound of the traffic outside, a word, or the sight of an actor weeping on the television screen.
But he would keep these things to himself. Never spoiling the happiness of the moment, never tarnishing Ruki with those memories, leaving what they had between them pure.
The last night they were together, he woke Ruki up to make love to him. With his passion, he made him forget what he had done and with his love, he made him forget who he was and Fuwa needed that just one more time.
That night it rained and Fuwa wouldn’t let him sleep, he kept him up, kissing him, touching him. Even after he came, he stayed there inside of him, holding him, running his lips across his neck repeatedly until the young man giggled and purred.
“Did you ever write a song?”
“No,” Ruki laughed. In the dark, his face was like a pale moon and his laughter was thick and deep like night water.
“How useless.” He laughed with him.
“How useless.”
When the morning came, he kissed him for the final time. Fuwa closed his eyes and felt him leave the room as if he carried a part of his soul with him, and he felt it physically inside him as if it were pulled out by a string, stolen and taken away across the sea to place he couldn’t return to.
He disappeared from his life just as quickly as he emerged. Fuwa’s existence regressed and he was once again, the tortured philosopher who read all day to keep away the silence. He was once again the fugitive saint watching the lost humanity swarm around him, never bothering to speak to them.
Until at last, he left Hong Kong and wandered east.
~ ~ ~ + ~ ~ ~
“Tell me where and when and I’ll be there” he had said.
6 months later. Los Angeles. In that cheap cafeteria with the sound of mahjong tiles smacking against one another and Chinese men laughing in the distance, Ruki had wrote down the name of the hotel on a napkin and slid it across the table and Fuwa had looked at it, folded it up and put it in his pocket.
Now, he waits there alone for hours as the waiter refills his cup of tea and the strangers pass by, coming and going, coming and going. But he stays. Waiting. Alone.
“Okay to smoke?” he asks the waiter in his stiff English.
“It’s okay,” he replies. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“Mhm,” Ruki nods as he pulls out a long cigarette and lights its end.
To be in love so much that it kills you.
When he returned to Tokyo, he wrote and wrote. The melodies poured from him like blood from an open wound. A love song. A love song. A love song. He could write nothing else.
There is a thing that makes you wish that a feeling could be strong enough to crush you.
Beyond the tall glass windows, against the dark of night, the palm trees sway in the hot California air. A beautiful young woman walks pass and her face is so sweet it makes him feel empty inside. Where she was going, he didn’t know and he never turns around to see.
He was a stranger in a strange land, waiting for a lover that he feared will never come. He steals a glance at her and looks away.
If people didn’t believe love could kill you, they wouldn’t have the will to live.
He closes his eyes and takes another drag from the cigarette.
The world feels as if it is about to swallow him.
“Did I keep you waiting?” A familiar voice in a familiar language.
Ruki looks up, two black crescent moons for eyes and coy smirk. “Mr. Fuwa,” he says with a smile as the pain as quickly as it came, fades away. “You are indeed, a romantic.”